… I have been trying to sort out fact from fiction in the highly imaginative accounts of the meeting. I have been able to isolate only one common point of agreement in all the published and unpublished reports that I have seen. That point of agreement is that everyone at the table was heard. That may not seem like a lot to an Oracle or IBM, but name the last time Microsoft was listening to everyone in a public and international forum? At a table where a standard for a future product was being debated by non-Microsoft groups? So, now that Microsoft is listening (something we should encourage), in an international and public forum, what are our options? Reject DIS 29500? The cost of rejection is that ordinary users, governments, smaller interests, all lose a seat at the table where the next version of the Office standard is being written.
Approve an admittedly rough DIS 29500? That gives all of us a seat at the table for the next Office standard.

Isn't the whole Open XML advocacy a cynical farce? Do you want to comment on this. Please do! Let me start with the premises:

There is no guarantee that the OOXML format will ever be implemented according to the ISO specification. ISO standardisation is a sales argument for government users, nothing more.

The Open XML specification is immature and both ECMA and the BRM failed to fix it. Not their fault as it was an abuse of process.

if the ISO process is delayed for now, everyone still has the ECMA specification that would hopefully be improved and needs to be improved.

Will non-approval weaken the position of "ordinary users, governments, smaller interests" and ISO?

Open XML has ISO competition: Patrick Durausau should be aware of and its future is held hostage by Microsoft stuffed ISO committees.

What is a seat at the table worth when you may not have any significant influence? Cmp. the poodle defense.

- Will Microsoft have listened now if DIS 29500 was approved already in Sep-07 ? And if it is approved now, will MS continue to listen ?
- Microsoft can decide that MS Office will continue to produce Transitional documents forever. Is it worth to be heard if no action is taken ?
- It is not obvious to me that "the cost of rejection is that ordinary users, governments, smaller interests, all lose a seat at the table". As said in the ISO/IEC press release, if this fast-track procedure is terminated, "This would not preclude subsequent re-submission under the normal IEC and ISO standards development rules." If MS really wants OOXML to become an ISO standard, they will re-submit a new text, and the benefit to ordinary users… will be that some pressure is put on MS to continue to listen.
- From the blogs of several NB delegates, I'm not sure that "everyone at the table was heard". Check the Malaysian press release for example (http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/2008/03/malaysian-deleg.html).
- The NB did their best to improve DIS29500 during the BRM, but it is obvious that not enough time was available to complete properly the job. IMHO, accepting DIS 29500 now will be a signal to all the ISO SCs that time-to-market is now more important for ISO standards than trying to correct the identified issues.

I'm far from being as optimistic as Patrick Durusau. Is it only because I'm far from being as wise as him ?

I represent a federal research institution : one of our big concerns is linked to exchange format, for scientific and administrative data exchanges and publications. I am sure that if ODF is duplicated by OOXML, by the simple 'network effect', sooner or later we will be obliged to use MS-Office20XX for good compatibility, even if many users are employing OO on Linux or MS-Windows since many years.

Like for ASCII texts during the Vi/Emacs debates, what we want is just to be free to use our 'favorite word-processor'. Everybody should be able to be free in administrations, research, schools etc.

To paraphrase Jason Matusow (Microsoft Director of Standards Affairs), by any rational measure, OOXML must be rejected from the ISO Fast-Track : a rational observer should wonder why an obvious fast-tracking failure is not simply dropped by ISO for formal reasons (size/time incompatibility, incompleteness), or removed by its authors for a better re-submission in place to lose their credibility.

For many observers, OOXML is not designed for the Common interest, like any general standard must be, but for strategic and commercial purpose, to help a monopoly to counter ODF in administrations and by cascade in the whole society.